Not yet sure if it is a good news or not, but Air France has become the first airline in the world to offer an in-flight mobile phone service on international flights.

One Airbus A318 aircraft operating European routes has been fitted with a mini GSM base station to provides 123 passengers the possibility to :

• Send and receive sms and mms messages
• Send and receive emails via all phones with Internet access

During the second half of the trial, passengers will be able to make and receive phone calls, with the service being regulated to maintain passengers’ comfort and well-being.

If passengers kindly turn off ringing traffic data from/to an aircraft should not be a big deal, if not journeys may become quite annoying with uninterrupted flow of incoming messages ringing alert.

Hard to imagine how will be a long haul flight with full mobile phone services (voice and data) "offered" to passengers. 

At the end of the six-month trial, Air France will examine the feedback and comments made by customers to determine whether to launch this service on all its flights.

What is your feeling about the availability of in-flight mobile phone service ? 

For the technical part,
Air France uses Mobile OnAir onboard mobile telephony system, certified by EASA (European Aviation Safety Authority) which does not interfere with the radio-navigation instruments on this Airbus A318 and may only be used at cruising altitude once the new illuminated sign “Switch off your phone” is turned off (recycling the "no smoking" sign ?).  The system is activated at 3,000 metres (10,000 feet).

More about this trial on AirFrance site including a video of the 1st trial flight.

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To take advantage of the potential of Google's Search engine, it's important to know some of its basic tricks

• Keywords: Quality of the responses depends on the quality of the words chosen. For example, "computer" does not give the same results as "PC".
• Typing words in lowercase give you every opportunity not to miss any important reference.
• Quotation marks (" ") make sure that the search engine takes into account all the words.
• Signs "+" and "-" add constraints to your search.
  For example, you can search for documents on George Lucas who only speak of Star Wars (george lucas + star wars) or on the contrary who do not speak of the film (george lucas star wars)
• Wildcards: Google accepts the use of a wildcard (*) for the location of a missing word in a phrase.
• The tilde (~) allows Google to display not only a word but also its synonyms, in a broad sense, that is to say, beyond the true grammatical synonyms, related terms.

More searching options:

• "site: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx". Returned results will be only from the selected site.
• "author: xxxxx xxxxxx". Identifies latest articles published by the author in question.
• "insubject: xxxxx" Results show the articles on related requested subjet.
• "location: xxxxx" Displays information bearing to the specified eyes.
• "source: xxxxxx" Results extracted from any source.
• "allintitle: xxxxxx" Results show the articles where all searched keywords are available in the title

The search bar includes also a calculator. Type the calculation directly in your search bar and press enter to have the result displayed.

More about Google seach engine: Google Help

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Cory Doctorow wrote this Creative Commons-licensed fiction story for Radar Online magazine.

  Une version française est disponible ici

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.” –Cardinal Richelieu

“We don’t know enough about you.” –Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8 p.m., but by the time he’d made it to the front of the customs line, it was after midnight. He’d emerged from first class, brown as a nut, unshaven, and loose-limbed after a month on the beach in Cabo (scuba diving three days a week, seducing French college girls the rest of the time). When he’d left the city a month before, he’d been a stoop-shouldered, potbellied wreck. Now he was a bronze god, drawing admiring glances from the stews at the front of the cabin.

Four hours later in the customs line, he’d slid from god back to man. His slight buzz had worn off, sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck were so tense his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod had long since died, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-age couple ahead of him.

“The marvels of modern technology,” said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration–Powered by Google.

“I thought that didn’t start until next month?” The man was alternately wearing and holding a large sombrero.

Googling at the border. Christ. Greg had vested out of Google six months before, cashing in his options and “taking some me time"–which turned out to be less rewarding than he’d expected. What he mostly did over the five months that followed was fix his friends’ PCs, watch daytime TV, and gain 10 pounds, which he blamed on being at home instead of in the Googleplex, with its well-appointed 24-hour gym.

He should have seen it coming, of course. The U.S. government had lavished $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, and hadn’t caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.

The DHS officer had bags under his eyes and squinted at his screen, prodding at his keyboard with sausage fingers. No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the god damned airport.

Read the rest of this entry »

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